 Tell me about your work at UN Environment. What area do you focus on? Based at the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, which is in the UK, and over the last 10 years, really, we've been working on Red Plus, largely supporting the UN Red Programme. And countries within that programme to think about how they're going to manage their forest carbon stocks in a way that promotes other values too, so making sure that their biodiversity is protected, that their ecosystem services, that people depend on are protected. So that's including mapping work that looks at how those values are distributed across the forest and also some of the safeguards that are in place. And you just had a session at today's event, looking at what we call Black Gold or the carbon stocks that is found in peat. Can you tell me a bit about what you presented at that discussion forum? Indonesia for a long time has known that they've got very important carbon stocks in their peatlands as well as their forests, but other countries such as Peru and the Republic of Congo and the Democratic of Congo, it's only coming to their attention more recently that actually there are significant carbon stocks in the peatland below ground as well. So I've been talking about the central Congo Basin. Between the two countries there's a depression called the Kuwait Central and it's about the size of Germany and there's been some work done very recently by a team of researchers from the UK and also from the Republic of Congo and they've identified that about half of it is probably peat swarm forest. So it's much more peatland. People have known for a long time that there was peatland in this region but there's much more peatland than anybody had anticipated and much more carbon stock in there. So this gives the countries obviously a new and very important thing to think about when they're working out how they're going to make sure that they're contributing to climate change mitigation and looking after their ecosystem carbon stocks. And how significant is this? We knew that these colleagues had been working on the topic but I was really surprised at the extent of the peatlands which is about five times what people had previously thought and the amount of carbon in those peatlands is estimated to be about 30 gigatons of carbon which is just in a few percent of the land area of the two countries but it's about the same as the carbon stocks in all the forest biomass of those whole countries so it's a very concentrated stock. So what are the next steps forward? We have this discovery now this amount is known. What has been done? So far this area has remained pretty intact which is the first piece of news it's good news it's in a good condition so now it's up to everybody in the international community to support those two countries to make sure that it stays that way because it's newly on the radar for them as well as for everybody else and we've known that that area has been important for other reasons already you know that it's got a high biodiversity value there are gorillas in some of the forest there's bonobos in the region so there are many reasons that this area is of global importance already but this is another reason that means that we need to think a bit more about how that land is going to be used in the future. The things I haven't mentioned so far is that whilst this area has been so far largely undamaged there's a little bit of deforestation you can see from the global maxotree cover loss around the edges of the area but it's in a good condition however there are a few forest concessions around the edge and the whole area well not quite the whole area but very much of the area has concessions for exploration for oil and gas or for mining so it feels like we could be at a turning point for this region and it's it's the right time to discover this additional importance but it means that there's an important job to do of working out how the area can be conserved. This platform really aims to get everyone to sit at the table rather than sit in silos have you found the day so far and have you been having conversations across the table? Absolutely and also I've been at the Global Peatlands Initiative second partners meeting before this so we've had an opportunity to be chatting about these topics for three days now including having a field visit to Riau in Sumatra which was extraordinary for me because I haven't visited that ecosystem before and seeing how Indonesia is starting to more than to test to implement the restoration of the hydrology of those systems is really encouraging and so lovely to see the enthusiasm of everybody in the province you know from government right down to the villages who we visited. I also really enjoyed the plenary sessions this morning again hearing from the local people about how they've been using the peatlands health they're needing to adapt their their agricultural systems to deal with the prohibition on the use of fire so the strategies that they're trying out it all feels like it's moving in a good direction it's a big job